If you wanted to send some money to the government of North Korea, you’d find it pretty difficult. Banks are required to check who their customers are, and when they learn theirs is a foreign government subject to economic sanctions, they’ll decline to do business.
But what if you wanted to send DNA sequences for hazardous viruses to the government of North Korea? Weirdly enough, that’s easier to do.
No US or international law requires companies that print DNA sequences to check what exactly they’re selling or who they’re selling it to. Nearly all of the companies working in this exciting new field — called DNA synthesis — check anyway because they want their pioneering industry to transform medicine and science, not call down a catastrophe. “If there’s an order for Ebola that’s being ordered by the CDC in Atlanta, that’s great,” James Diggans, director of Data Science and Biosecurity for Twist Bioscience, told me. “But if we get an order for Ebola to be shipped to North Korea, we won’t do it.”
Twist and many of its competitors are in a voluntary association called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium (IGSC), which works to set out guidelines so that gene synthesis — a new technology that is making it vastly easier to do crucial medical research — can be cheaply available, even as biosecurity concerns are appropriately addressed.
But “many” doesn’t mean “all,” and there are a few companies cutting corners. Membership in the IGSC is entirely voluntary. “The vast majority of DNA synthesis companies are good actors, but there are some companies that are not good actors,” Emily Leproust, the CEO of Twist Bioscience, told me.
Screening properly costs money, and as DNA synthesis gets cheaper, the companies that cut corners can beat more legitimate actors on price. “As an industry, we’re driving down the cost to enable more research, which is a good outcome,” said Leproust, “but the more the cost…
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